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First, sorry for the tardiness of this issue. While I was late, this duty has helped remind me of what I love about blogging. With my recent and sudden move to a new country and a new job, I have been ignoring the Blogosphere. Editing the Carnival reminds me not of the joys of sharing my own ideas, but instead of the value of the communities and conversations that arise out of this media. As a submission based publication, the Carnival embodies the best qualities of this community and encourages contributions from readers as well as bloggers. I would encourage my readers, whether you blog or not, to send your contributions in to the Carnival. Next week is at Libraryola. Submissions can be made directly to chris(at)libraryola(dot)com. All this being said, it also forced me to attend to my aggregator, and I found a few I really should post a response to. Now for the submissions.

I am saving the earliest submission for last because it may be just a wee bit controversial with the Carnival’s regular readers. We have a few submissions this week by Connie Crosby: Blog by a Canadian Law Librarian. The first submission by Connie is a book review with commentary on a title of particular interest to bibliobloggers, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Connie gives a thorough summary of a book that discusses the effects of Web 2.0. Definitely a submission which reflects back on the nature of Carnival. Connie follows this submission up with a discussion of the Toronto Wiki Tuesdays meetup. There they discussed the same book. I was especially interested in this post for two reasons. First, I moved to Toronto a few weeks ago and am looking for ways to “socially network” in a face-to-face environment. Second is a great list of 8 things Connie learned about wikis at the meeting. I would defintily check out that list and just might be at the next meeting.

On a lighter note, Jason at “Thus Spoke the Pragmatic Librarian” discussed problems with search engine relevancy rankings by sharing and analyzing some of the interesting searches that brought people to his blog. His post makes me wonder if search might work better with a if it were powered by a more collaborative and human touch.

Next is a post by Karen G. Schneider for the ALA TechSource Blog. She tackles IT and Sympathy. While it is a longer post that covers many issues, I would like to highlight her “‘strategery’ for IT planning by non-IT departments.” The strategy is roughly the second half of the essay.

In the next submission, Joy Weese Moll of “Wanderings of a Library Student”, describes the design and marketing of a high speed instruction style, Lightning Learning. The post gives the background, but you might also want to check out the website of the project. Joy is adding updates of how the sessions are going.

Before mentioning the controversial post, I want to add a few of my selections. First I wanted to remind everyone of the many posts covering Midwinter. The Midwinter Wiki links to bloggers covering the conference. While there are many wonderful posts I want to point out tat least one. Along with other coverage, Jane of “Wandering Eyre” blogged OCLC’s Blog Salon (includes a great picture). I also read a great post about why someone didn’t attend, but can’t find it. If you know the one I am speaking of, please let me know.

I can’t put it off any longer. John Swift writes a post on “Who Needs Books?” I don’t really know how to respond to this one. I leave that to you.

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Hi subscribers and visitors. I have been silent for a little while as I prepare to finish graduate school. I will soon be losing my university web space. Since I host some projects there that I want to keep up on the web, I figured it was as good a time as any to jump ship from Blogger.

I am now located at http://mchabib.com/, hosted on LISHost, and running WordPress with a K2 theme. I am much happier than I was on the Blogspot servers and Blogger platform. I am still working on this site, so please feel free to offer suggestions as to how I can improve it.

If you got this in your feedreader, then it means you are subscribed to my Feedburner feed, which I am keeping as my primary feed. My comment feed is also remaining the same. The blogger blog is going to remain in the same spot, so old links will remain valid. However, I am going to put a sign up notifying visitors of the new location.

They began by pointing out that, as far as they can recall, this is the first time that they have given a talk on blogging together.

They set out with a simple goal, but the discussion oriented nature of the conference led to many interesting tangents. Below are my notes and thoughts on the talk.

Write from the heart – I missed the actual quote, but the idea is one we have all heard before. Write what you are passionate about.

â€œRead other blogsâ€ – Robert points out that if you read blogs and donâ€™t feel the impulse to write your own, then you probably shouldnâ€™t be blogging. I can relate to this. Even though I read blogs on and off for a while before I began my own, there was always a little part of me that felt left out of the conversation.

â€œPick a niche you can own (be different)â€Maryam pointed out that Robert always says that there are two types of bloggers. One type has a desire to change things and is writing for an audience. Robert fits into that category. The second kind are those bloggers, like Maryam, who blog just for the sake of it. Either way, it is important to hit a unique market. Robert discusses the importance of branding your niche so that people begin to relate you and you niche.I have tried to do this with Academic Library 2.0. While I cover many related topics, I always come back to this one. As Robert was discussing this, I began to think of how social networking services increasingly need to focus on niche markets.

â€œLink to other blogsâ€ (and comment). – When Maryam began her blog, she told Robert not to link to her because she wanted to earn her incoming links. Even so, Dave Winer linked to her blog on its first day and brought 3,000 unique visitors to her site. Donâ€™t underestimate the power of linking. Also, donâ€™t underestimate the power of link love. Robert points out that the internet rewards. They also stressed the importance of linking to material covering both sides of an issue because you automatically gain a level of authority above someone linking only to one side.

â€œAdmit mistakesâ€ – Maryam said that Robert has earned her respect on this one. Robert also mentioned the importance of keeping private data sacrosanct.

â€œWrite good headlinesâ€ â€“ Robert says that he moves items straight from his aggregator to his link-blog based on the headline alone. Similarly, he deletes most other posts coming through his aggregator because they have uninteresting or uninformative titles. Interesting to note, Robert said that he mostly subscribes to feeds for searches rather than individual blogs. I too have found ,myself doing this more and more. The eye tracking study that shows people look for keywords in headlines was mentioned. They point out that people love lists and are more likely to read posts with a list title. Jokingly they say that this is why they used a list for their presentation! Maryam points out that her most popular post is titled, â€œIn Defense of Geeks or Ten Reasons Why You Should Date a Geek.

Use other media - Robert is convinced TechCrunch was discovered because Michael added a graphic to every post.The internet is a gift economy. I contributed my story about how I wanted to share my concept models. Instead of putting them on my blog, I put them on Flickr because I new there was a much better chance of someone discovering them. In fact, I had a pretty good idea that the more well known Library 2.0 bloggers would see it there. Michael Stephens did find it on Flickr and linked to the Flickr image. I lost some traffic to my blog, but I got my ideas out there, which was most important. My basic point was that social networking services can be a powerful way to share your work. Given that more people are subscribing to searches for tags, this is even more important. Ed Cone backed me up and said it was a really â€œpowerful point.â€ Then Maryam threw a t-shirt at me because of the importance of my contribution. This was especially cool because many others had contributed, but I was the first to earn a t-shirt! Robert moved from this point straight to Second Life. As he was listing all of the things that you can put in Second Life, I, given the confidence from the t-shirt, yelled out “libraries”. He spoke a lot about what was covered in an article in The Economist a few weeks ago.

â€œHave a voiceâ€ â€“ I think the saying they used was, â€œIf you want to dig a goldmine, you need to use some dynamite.â€ Sometimes you have to take a stand for good. They discussed how Robert stood up against Steve Balmer surrounding Microsoftâ€™s support, or lack there of, for a gay rights bill. He mentioned that he asked Maryam if it was okay to take the risk of getting fired. After she read over his post, she said it was okay. I really liked this story. It points out the importance of standing up for what you believe in, yet it also points out that sometimes you need to think of the consequences beyond what might happen to you.

â€œGet outside the blogosphereâ€ â€“ Go to events. Meet people. They then ran out of time and threw up their last few slides. They actually ended up having 15 suggestions.

â€œMarket yourself”

â€œWrite Wellâ€ â€“ Spell check, check your state of mind.

â€œExpose Yourself”

â€œHelp other people blogâ€ â€“ Donâ€™t play hierarchy games.

â€œEngage with commentersâ€

â€œKeep your integrityâ€- Robert said it is important that â€œYou are what you seem you are.”

I asked the last question of the session. I asked Robert if he had any advice on how one might pitch the idea of having a public blogger. The scenario I gave him was making the pitch at a job interview with a large company. He pointed out the importance of sharing original unscripted content. He also said it is important to point out (to the company) that they canâ€™t control the world.

Given the tardiness of my coverage, a few people already have some excellent posts up about this talk. So if you want to learn read more about the Scoblesâ€™s talk, check out mistersugar’s take on BlogTogether or Daniel’s take on Xark.